Advanced Diploma in Decolonial Thought and Critical Theory of Modernity

• Class 1: 100 Years Since the Frankfurt Institute: Critical Theory Today
  Teacher: Miguel Contreras Natera
  
  A century after the founding of the Institute for Social Research, Critical Theory remains relevant as a research program aimed at understanding and transforming the historical forms of domination that capitalism has made manifest. However, its relevance lies not only in reiterating its classic formulations on culture, instrumental rationality, or advanced capitalism, but also in reinterpreting them in light of current global conditions, marked by new configurations of inequality, civilizational crisis, and the persistence of colonial hierarchies. A decolonial reading allows us to reaffirm the original critical character of this approach by recalling that modernity was constituted simultaneously with processes of colonization, racialization, and epistemic subordination. Incorporating this dimension broadens the critical horizon, showing that domination is not limited to economic exploitation or cultural reification, but also operates through the historical denial of knowledge, territories, and ways of life situated outside the European center. From this perspective, Critical Theory is revitalized by engaging with experiences and reflections from the Global South, avoiding its reduction to a closed academic tradition. This shift involves both broadening and deepening the critical dimension: recovering its emancipatory vocation, its connection to transformative social practices, and its commitment to a rationality capable of opening alternative horizons. Thus, one hundred years after its emergence, Critical Theory remains a field in motion. Its current strength lies in articulating critiques of capitalism, coloniality, the ecological crisis, and the plurality of knowledges, projecting a broader and more situated social critique.
  
  
• Class 2: Beyond the Stalinist legacy: Was there a crisis of Marxism?
  Teacher: Roger Landa
  
  The so-called “crisis of Marxism” in the mid-20th century does not signify a uniform collapse of the theory, but rather a series of open debates about its validity, its methods, and its capacity to interpret new historical transformations. Following World War II, several processes strained classical assumptions: the consolidation of the Soviet bloc and critiques of Stalinism, the expansion of capitalism with welfare states in Western Europe, the emergence of anti-colonial movements, and new forms of social conflict that did not fully fit within the exclusive centrality of the industrial working class. In Europe, the discussion took on a strong philosophical and theoretical character. Some authors sought to recover humanist and critical dimensions of Marxism, emphasizing subjectivity, culture, and everyday experience; others, such as certain structuralist currents, insisted on the need for a scientific, rather than a humanist, reading of Marx; while German critical theory examined how advanced capitalism ideologically integrated societies. In socialist countries, however, the crisis was more directly linked to the political legitimacy of “real socialism.” In Latin America, the problem was posed differently. Marxism had to engage with economic dependency, national-popular movements, and peripheral revolutions. In Argentina, for example, debates about Peronism, cultural hegemony, and revolutionary strategy shaped the discussion; in Mexico, the philosophy of praxis and the relationship between Marxism and the national revolutionary tradition took center stage. Therefore, this “crisis” must be understood in the plural: not as a linear decline nor as a simple triumphant renewal, but as a field of reinterpretations situated historically and geographically. Understanding it requires recognizing that Marxism did not evolve in a single direction, but rather through tensions between theory, politics, and context.
  
  
• Class 3: Poststructuralist debates seen from Latin America
  Teacher: Miguel Contreras Natera 
  
  Poststructuralist debates marked a significant shift in contemporary social theory by questioning established notions of subject, truth, history, and foundation. Their contributions allowed for a problematization of the ways in which power permeates language, knowledge, and the production of identities, opening critical perspectives against the totalizing narratives of modernity. However, when viewed from a Latin American perspective, these debates acquire specific nuances and raise questions distinct from those that gave rise to them. In the region, the reception of poststructuralism has been mediated by historical experiences of coloniality, economic dependency, and structural inequality. This compels us to ask to what extent the critique of modern universals can be detached from the material and geopolitical conditions that have shaped these experiences. Thus, the deconstruction of categories such as subject, state, or development has not only an epistemological but also a political dimension, insofar as it allows us to make visible the historical hierarchies that have subordinated territories, cultures, and forms of knowledge. This situated reading has also highlighted limitations in certain uses of poststructuralism, especially when discursive critique tends to dilute the economic, technological, or ecological dimensions of contemporary domination. For this reason, the Latin American dialogue has sought to articulate the analysis of discourse and power with broader historical perspectives and concrete social practices. From this perspective, poststructuralist debates are not discarded, but rather reconfigured. Their critical potential expands when they connect with social struggles, local knowledge, and historical experiences of the Global South, contributing to a more situated, pluralistic social critique that is attentive both to the symbolic structures of power and to its material bases.

• Class 4: The opening of debates on modernity/decoloniality and their implications in the social sciences
  Teacher: José Romero Losacco
  
  Three decades ago, in a context marked by the discourse of the end of history and Western triumphalism following the fall of the Soviet Union, the fifth centenary of the invention/invasion of the Americas was celebrated globally. This moment coincided with emblematic events such as the Seville Expo and the 1992 Barcelona Olympic Games, which reinforced the narrative of a victorious West. However, in parallel, the left began to face a profound crisis that persists to this day. In response, a group of Latin American and Abya Yala intellectuals, from diverse traditions such as liberation philosophy, dependency theory, the pedagogy of the oppressed, community feminisms, Black Marxisms, and postcolonialism, began to construct a critical agenda. This agenda, centered on shared concerns and challenges, laid the groundwork for what later became known as the Decolonial Turn, a radical critique of modernity/coloniality. This session seeks to explore the content that has shaped the decolonial project, analyzing its trajectories, shifts, and the main theoretical and practical challenges it has faced. It also considers the global framework of transformations that have occurred in the world system during the first decades of the 21st century, which has influenced the development and relevance of this critical thought. The objective is to assess the impact and evolution of these ideas, recognizing their contribution to the reconfiguration of contemporary social struggles.
  
  
• Class 5: Is there a method for thinking about transmodernity?
  Teacher: Katya Colmenares
  
  Modern science established as its methodological foundation the self-reflexivity of reason, which posits itself as an insurmountable presupposition that determines all possible knowledge. Hegel's dialectic provides the definitive form of modernity's self-understanding. However, Marx warns that this self-reflexivity expresses a methodological inversion to conceal its transontological foundation. Thus, not only dialectics but the very reality created by capitalist modernity turns out to be an inverted reality: fetishized. In other words, this inversion is already present in the mode of production of modern life, such that this inversion reproduces, in the realm of thought, an inverted dialectic as the self-understanding of the (inverted) reality of modernity. Thinking beyond this inversion implies thinking from the reality that modernity has concealed: the reproduction of human life. Thus, making explicit the content of the transontological logic that starts from the reproductive rationality of the real life of living beings is the necessary step to, from there, build a new logic that allows thinking from the alterreflexivity of a transmodern project.
  
  
• Class 6: The Hydra of Modernity. Epistemological Notes for its Understanding
  Teacher: Roger Landa
  
  Our presentation is framed within the search for a hermeneutical fusion of horizons between critical Marxism, decoloniality, and the philosophy of liberation. We begin with the need for these three discourses to intersect in order to complicate the enunciative position from which modernity is understood. In this initial approach, we reconstruct the phenomenology of modernity and its multiple hierarchies to problematize the need for an ontological foundation that explains the dialectical unity of domination. From this epistemological framework, we briefly discuss the proposal of the Philosophy of Liberation put forth by Enrique Dussel in his later works, where he posits the ego as an ontological foundation, and the Decolonial Turn in the interpretive line of Quijano-Grosfoguel, which posits racial classification as a foundation. We conclude by proposing an interpretive framework based on the category of power patterns of modernity, developed from a Marxist perspective, leaving open several questions for further epistemological inquiry.

• Class 7: Decolonial theory and “other” theories: world-system, critical Marxism, philosophy of liberation and postcoloniality
  Teacher: Leonardo Bracamonte
  
  The world-systems analysis perspective has established itself within the social sciences as a space associated with the question of the history, functioning, and crises of social systems. It involves the analysis of the economic, social, and cultural structures created throughout the long history of human societies. This objective led to other aims, including the problematization of the organizational forms of modern institutionalized knowledge, a process that took place primarily as part of the development of the modern university during the 19th century. The tradition of world-systems analysis began in the mid-1970s with the publication of Volume 1 of *The Modern World-System: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century*, by Immanuel Wallerstein. This work developed an intellectual output aimed precisely at understanding historical capitalism (seen as a world-economy) and its possible transition to other social systems. Another perspective that arises with the intention of highlighting the limitations of inherited knowledge, and which consequently converges with the perspective of world-systems analysis in the imperative to discern the generation of these forms of knowledge that underlyingly express the historically exclusionary constitution of the modern world, is inscribed within the tradition of decolonial thought. The critique of the limitations of the predominant ways of knowing will advance toward a political critique of the arbitrary capitalist order. The class session will then emphasize the explanatory potential of world-systems analysis, while simultaneously advancing the critique of modernity that the so-called decolonial turn outlined.
  
  
• Class 8: Decolonial turn, postcoloniality and Marxism
  Teacher: José Gandarilla Salgado
  
  In this session, we will first analyze Postcolonial Theory. We will see how its genealogy traces back to subaltern studies in India before moving to literature departments in the United States under the influence of figures such as Said, Bhabha, and Spivak. We will discuss the critiques of authors like Chibber and Ahmad, who argue that this approach, by merging with poststructuralism, has undergone a process of "bourgeoisification" and depoliticization, focusing its attention on discourse analysis over the material realities of exploitation. Next, we will address the Decolonial Approach, represented by the Latin American research program of Quijano, Dussel, and Mignolo. We will explain how this approach maintains that modernity and coloniality constitute an inseparable complex; that is, there is no modernity without coloniality. We will trace its roots to the Caribbean anticolonial thought of Césaire and Fanon, and to José Martí's defense of "Our America." Finally, we will compare both methods. While postcolonial theory typically focuses on deconstruction and the interstices of language, the decolonial approach proposes a shift from totality to totalization. We will seek to understand how the latter aims to reclaim the voice of the "wretched of the earth" from their external perspective in order to construct an analogical pluriversality and a new humanism. To this end, we will explore the intersections and tensions with critical Marxism to demonstrate the renewal of decolonial critique, which reveals the pluriversality of oppressed subjects.
  
  
• Class 9: Critical perspectives on the debates about modernity/transmodernity
  Teacher: Haydeé García Bravo
  
  In this class, we will review the notion of transmodernity proposed by the Argentinian-Mexican philosopher Enrique Dussel and attempt to generate a creative diffraction between this notion and the proposal of the American feminist philosopher of science Donna Haraway regarding the Chthulucene and sympoiesis. For Dussel, the future transmodern culture does not discard the emancipatory and critical perspectives of Western modernity, but rather evaluates them with different criteria. Thus, transmodernity will be the result of an intercultural dialogue that involves the decentering of the West and the configuration of a pluriversality. In this sense, transmodernity avoids univocity and linearity, and the contribution of his entire philosophical system—the notion of exteriority—becomes relevant. With Haraway's proposals, this notion of exteriority is expanded to include non-human beings and multispecies relationships. Both proposals destabilize Western time, bringing into play temporalities that involve diverse dynamics and rhythms, reactivating pasts that are not entirely closed, and alluding to moments of social, cultural, and artistic creativity. Because the trans refers to another temporality, one that we seem not to have yet experienced. From my interpretation, transmodernity is not entirely in the future, as something almost unattainable, but rather we have had glimpses of this form of relationship in pasts that pointed toward forms of emancipation, as can be seen in the proposals that have emerged from cultures marginalized by modernity. Thus, I propose that some artistic manifestations, linked to alternative social movements and struggles, can, from the past, project other futures. This implies rethinking and reactivating historical memory and allowing ourselves to visualize other imaginaries where interconnection is not domination and subjugation, but rather mutual enrichment and liberation.

• Class 10: The transformations of care during and after the pandemic
  Teacher: Alba Carosio
  
  The COVID-19 pandemic revealed, through daily evidence, the interdependence and vulnerability of humanity, and clearly highlighted the centrality of relationships oriented toward social reproduction, life, and its care. Within the context of the health emergency, the care of life took center stage, and the care work carried out in households and communities, primarily by women, came to the forefront. Isolation and confinement measures made it clear that households are life-sustaining environments, where women are the primary workers, whether paid or unpaid. In the early stages of the pandemic, care assumed a central place on the public and communication agenda, through a direct appeal to society. This central and omnipresent activity gained greater visibility during the pandemic, although this did not necessarily translate into a greater appreciation of its implications, the time costs, the consequences for bodies, and the need for public policies. Ways of managing time and relationships were explored as the burden of care increased in families and communities. The entire set of factors shaping the social and familial organization of care within the framework of the indivisible productive-reproductive dyad deepened inequality and the gaps of class, gender, ethnicity, age, abilities, and territory. The collective and community-based solutions that became common in the most disadvantaged areas did not endure after the lockdown ended.
  In this class, we aim to produce lines of reflection based on empirical evidence about the impact and future of the indispensable transformations in the organization of care, with special emphasis on our Latin American and Caribbean region.
  
  
• Class 11: Epistemic and (geo)political disputes surrounding climate change: contributions from a Latin American political ecology
  Teacher: Emiliano Terán Mantovani
  
  The global civilizational crisis facing the planet must be understood as a multidimensional, systemic crisis that shapes every aspect of life. At its core lies a colonial relationship of control and domination over nature, which, especially during the era of fossil fuel capitalism, has generated an extraordinary situation of ecological degradation that is jeopardizing life on Earth as we know it. One of the most dramatic manifestations is climate change, which is showing increasingly severe signs in the 21st century. In this class, we aim not only to explore the various scenarios arising from the climate crisis, but also to analyze the main epistemic and (geo)political disputes surrounding it, in terms of the frameworks of interpretation and response at play, and the different implications that stem from them. We will present a critical perspective on dominant views of climate change, those deployed within the framework of (neo)colonial global power relations and extractivism in Latin America and the Caribbean, contrasting them with a reading from political ecology that offers critical analytical tools and alternative interpretations of the issue. We are interested in understanding climate change in its causal and evolutionary relationship with the development of capitalism/coloniality, and its particular metabolic relationship with the web of life. Therefore, we advocate a systemic (not fragmented) and (geo)political interpretation of it.
  
  
• Class 12: Artificial intelligence and the technological transformations of late capitalism
  Teacher: Jorge Veraza
  
  The first part will present the political economy of the production of Artificial Intelligence services and products according to Marx's theory of value and surplus value. We will include the transformation of values ​​into production prices and the law of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall. An appendix will address the impossibility of accounting for the problem based solely on land rent and technological rent. In the second part, we will revisit the results of the previous research, situating them in relation to the decline of US global hegemony and, consequently, the decline of the warmongering aspect of Capitalist Civilization, heirs to the warmongering aspects of Eurasian Civilizations. This will allow us to establish the Great Civilizational Divergence between these civilizations and the communal Civilization of Anáhuac. Finally, we will frame these discussions within the context of the struggle for sovereignty for all the peoples of the Earth, which is the defining theme of the 21st century. Even after the collapse of US global hegemony is resolved.

• Class 13: How to understand the rise of the new right?
  Teacher: Fernando Calderón Gutiérrez
  
  From a cartographic perspective, we will examine the rise of the new right, not as an accident, but as a symptom of conflicting projects of modernity that express the limits of democracy in the region. We will investigate the historical inflection point brought about by the erosion of traditional systems of representation and the frustration of social expectations. We will show how the coexistence of weak institutional foundations alongside a fractured social fabric allows for the emergence of a subjective demand for strong leaders who offer extraordinary solutions to fear and insecurity. Right-wing leadership can be explained by an emotional community born of crisis, where the charismatic leader acts as a bridge between a fragmented society and a state incapable of managing conflict. We will also analyze how these figures employ informational and media politics to seduce the public that does not feel represented by political parties. This leads to a paradox in which, while democracy is valued as a system, there is simultaneously a growing willingness to accept "iron fist" governments due to victimization by crime and economic inefficiency. Finally, we will discuss the "dialectic of denying the other." These new right-wing movements tend to redefine the "enemy" (whether the "establishment," the criminal, or the ideological adversary), exacerbating a culture of inequality that hinders the social construction of universal rights. We will conclude by evaluating whether these leaders can transition toward a substantive democracy or whether, on the contrary, they will consolidate an authoritarian "democracy of bosses" that jeopardizes political pluralism.
  
  
• Class 14: Current overview of political and social struggles in Latin America and the Caribbean.
  Teacher: Santiago Daroca
  
  The political and social landscape of Latin America and the Caribbean is characterized by a complex dynamic of struggles and transformations that reflect the profound inequalities, historical legacies, and aspirations for change of its peoples. Many of these struggles can be viewed through the lens of transmodernity, which emerges as a critical paradigm in opposition to Eurocentric modernity, proposing an epistemological and political reconfiguration that integrates historically silenced voices. In this sense, the class seeks to provide a general framework for understanding contemporary struggles in the region based on three key challenges: (1) The persistence of inequality and social exclusion, and how these factors fuel protest movements and demands for structural change. (2) The tension between extractive development models and the struggles for environmental justice and the rights of Indigenous peoples. (3) The challenges to democratic consolidation in the region, including the threat of authoritarianism, corruption, and distrust in institutions. Students will learn to identify common patterns and significant differences among the countries of the region, to evaluate the effectiveness of different political and social mobilization strategies and to consider the implications of these struggles for the future of democracy and development in Latin America, and thus, contribute in an informed and critical manner to contemporary debates on social and political change in the region.
  
  
• Class 15: Advances, tensions and setbacks of the Latin American left
  Teacher: Omar Vázquez Heredia
  
  The first decades of the 21st century in Latin America were characterized by the proliferation of national-populist and progressive governments in various countries. This phenomenon was termed "the leftward shift" or "the cycle of challenge to neoliberalism." In this class, we propose a general overview of the academic debates that took place during this historical period. This proliferation of so-called leftist governments in Latin America has been explained by the population's rejection of the consequences of neoliberal policies implemented in the latter decades of the 20th century. It has also been argued that the emergence of these governments resulted from citizens' demands for state intervention in the face of the economic and communicational flows of globalization. This reality was analyzed by identifying two leftist movements: one Bourbon and anti-democratic, and the other modern and democratic, each with a different relationship to respect for democracy and the defense of equitable economic development. Other authors also referred to the existence of two lefts, but in their case, to the revolutionary, anti-capitalist left, and the reformist, anti-neoliberal left. From a Gramscian perspective, the cycle of the left was studied by characterizing these governmental experiences as “passive revolutions,” in which there were both continuities and changes. Finally, left-wing governments were understood as part of the “Commodities Consensus,” due to their development of neo-developmentalist and neo-extractivist policies. At the same time, other authors defended the need for state control of common natural resources to promote the social and economic distribution of the income generated by their exploitation and export.

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Classes will begin in August and will conclude in December 2026.

All registered participants will receive, on the first day of activities, the necessary instructions to access the classes, bibliography, and discussion forums through the CLACSO Virtual Training Space.

Accessing and navigating the Virtual Learning Environment is very simple and user-friendly. In any case, a technical and academic support team will always be available. For inquiries, you can write to [email protected] 

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Exceptional criteria: In exceptional cases and within the first 20 days of starting the Higher Diploma, the student may write to [email protected] Requesting withdrawal and stating the reasons. After the case is evaluated, a response will be sent to the request. If approved, the student may resume the Higher Diploma program if a new cohort is offered the following year. After that period of time has elapsed since the start of the course, no requests will be accepted.

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The Advanced Diploma program integrates a dynamic of asynchronous and synchronous classes. Classes are primarily asynchronous. The schedule for synchronous sessions will be communicated by the Diploma coordinator at the beginning of the program, and participation in these sessions is not a prerequisite for passing the program.